SWAN 15 - The Greatest Show Unearthed-

Song Without A Name
Morsel of Goodness 15
Home Baked by Lady Yate-xel

“What are you doing here again?”

“Coming to see how your other half has taken my warnings.”

“You’re being awfully wimpy about it for being Satan.”

Johnny and Pepito stood in the middle of the street – away from the radar of Edgar’s book. Pepito seemed pretty cheerful. “Do we really have to go over that again? I’ve already told you I’m not Satan.”

“Look, I don’t give a fuck who you technically are.”

Pepito smiled. “You seemed to give enough of a fuck to try to get away from him. Is there some reason you didn’t follow through?”

“Because he convinced me otherwise, what’s it to you?”

“It’s my conscience to me, as far as I see it,” Pepito said, irritated, it seemed, at himself.

Johnny laughed. “Satan has a conscience now? You’re just pulling this stuff out of your ass now, aren’t you? Look, I’ve got your stupid key, you’ve failed at being Satan pretty intensely by now, just leave me the fuck alone. Edgar won’t be feeling any super pain over anything. I’m going to make sure of it. However,” Johnny paused to look at the sky, “I am interested in what you wanted from me. You needed me for something, what is it?”

“You don’t get it, do you? You were doomed from the start! What I need from you will only come at the end and there’s nothing to save him from it! It’s nothing but a waiting game for us now!”

“’Us’?” Johnny asked.

“Myself and Heaven. They’re interested in how this turns out too, you know.”

“The more you talk, the less I’m interested in how this shit ‘turns out.’ I don’t even know why I agreed to talk to you.”

“Because you’re curious. Because you really want to know. Because the fate of you y the ‘boyfriend’ in there really-“

“HE IS NOT.”

“Protest if you want, I’ve already told you I know that it’s no different, and you have to stop it. I’m not going to be able to help you for too much longer, I-“

“Whoa, time out.” Johnny crossed his hands in front of his face. “This is helping? You want to run that by me again?”

“I’m here trying to stop him from being miserable, aren’t I?”

“And that’s ‘help’ I don’t want. Get the hell out of here. Go play your games and fuck with someone else’s existence – you’ve screwed up mine enough.”

Pepito let out some air. “It doesn’t make a difference,” he said. “In the end, it’s the same for us – you can only change how much he is hurt, nothing else. We’ll see you at the end then.” He vanished with a few clinks of a chain.

Johnny sighed, staring at the pavement where Pepito had been standing. He’d left a pothole. If Johnny had been the smoking type, this would have been where he’d have paused for a dramatic drag on a cigarette. Sadly, he didn’t smoke, so he sucked down the last of the cherry juice box that Pepito had interrupted, and went back inside.

*****

Edgar had recovered from his frustrated screaming from earlier in the evening, and was relatively calmly reading the inventory of his house while lounging on the couch. As he leafed through the pages, he watched Johnny’s name wiggle its way into the calligraphy of the latter pages. A few moments later, the door opened, and Johnny walked in, stubbornly sucking on the last drops of a juice box.

“You could just get a new one,” Edgar said. He really hated that juice box noise.

“Pepito was outside.”

“I’m starting to think he visits you at night and watches you sleep – would you mind letting me know about these things once and a while?”

“Yes.”

“What did he want this time, smart ass?”

“To tell me that the world is ending, that I’m taking you with me, and that everyone is gay,” Johnny said, flopping onto the couch. Edgar choked on his own spit and had to sit in a fit of coughs for a minute or two. Johnny did no more than raise an eyebrow.

“Better now?” Johnny asked after Edgar had gone a solid twenty seconds without hacking.

“I think I’m fine now, yes. Thanks for your concern.”

“How has Jimmy been doing with that guitar of his?” Johnny asked. Edgar was a bit startled at the abrupt topic change, but considering this was Johnny, it wasn’t really out of the ordinary.

“He’s… really getting better, I think,” Edgar answered after some thought. “Why do you ask?”

“I think it’s time,” Johnny said, looking into the fireplace. It wasn’t lit, and it wasn’t dirty. Edgar couldn’t even remember when they’d ever used it. More often than not they had things stacked in front of it.

“Time?” Edgar asked, trying to look at Johnny, but more interested in what Johnny was so fascinated with in the fireplace.

“Time to rock the fuck out. It’s about time we go for that happiness you keep telling me about.”

“And… your whole ‘evil’ thing?”

“I’ve already told you – happy and evil are not mutually exclusive.”

*****

It happened after the fourth try.

Edgar didn’t really realize it until after it happened. He’d been playing, as instructed, in the parking lot. He and the rest of the group had obediently followed Johnny’s every instruction and set up what dregs of equipment they had in a few parking places (using a fire hazard number of extension cords, surely) and played until they were exhausted. Tenna even played kazoo. Nothing had happened, and no one ever felt any different when it was over.

Then, a week and four concerts to no one later, there was eye contact. Edgar could not explain the feeling accurately. He had been letting his hands glide over the surface of every key, and for some reason, he felt he had to really pour himself into it. Everyone else seemed to feel the same thing and the music roared more intensely than he’d ever remembered. He’d projected himself off of the keys and felt truly that they were reaching beyond something that they’d never even touched before.

And then a student going to her car looked at them. Not a passing glance, not a glimpse of something from the corner of her eye, but an honest look. She stared at them, and when they finished a song, she walked toward them. Edgar was unsure of what to do – it had been so long since he’d had to worry about talking to new people.

“You… how did you do that?” the girl asked them. Edgar felt everyone change. A victory yell, a war cry, a scream, all silently contained with what little energy they had left.

“It’s what we do,” Johnny answered her. Edgar was fairly sure that Johnny didn’t know what she was asking about either, but he played it well.

“Could you,” she paused to look at everyone again, “do that again somewhere else?”

“Depends,” Johnny said. “What did you have in mind?”

“I think I know someone who could really use you.”

“Oh?”

“Come on, a band that just suddenly appears playing weird music like that? You guys would be great anywhere. Could you do what you did here in our cafeteria next Friday?”

“Maybe,” Johnny said thoughtfully. “Could you answer something for me though?”

“Um, sure.” The girl clutched her keys.

“Have you ever seen us before?”

“No, you just popped out of nowhere and suddenly there was a song and-“

“I mean at school.”

“You go to this school?”

Johnny smiled.

“We’ll be there.”

*****

No one watched them set up, and no one tried to not step on the cords. The students at whatever party Parking Lot Girl had been involved with gave Edgar and the rest of the group no indication that they even felt that it was odd that a place had been set aside for nothing. The party was themed apparently, and Tenna had decided that if they did become visible, the band would need to match the theme. For this reason alone was Edgar in acid washed jeans.

Eighties night.

No one knew what the eighties were originally, but the word evidently meant ‘outrageous’ nowadays. Devi was actually sporting some giant plastic earrings that Edgar found to be frightening, and Tenna had done some serious teasing to both their hair. For some reason, Johnny was not bothered by any of this mess, not even the makeup stars that Tenna had painted on all their faces. He stood silently in front of the rest of the band with energy moving through him already.

Edgar stopped himself from thinking too hard about two minutes before Johnny finally spoke.

“It’s Showtime.”

Johnny grabbed a microphone and swung it around to the speakers. The feedback earned him cursing and bitching from the band, but not even a murmur from the party.

“I think we need to wake them up,” Johnny said. He waved a hand and Tenna started their old tape deck. Hooked up to the biggest speakers they could find the sound was distorted and odd and a bit like a broken carnival.

Perfect.

Johnny started into an opening that he knew no one would hear.

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and ghouls
Step right up! Behind this curtain lies a ghastly concoction of delight horror fantasy and terror! Your every wish is our command - your every whimsical desire brought to life, but I’m warning you, there’s always a price.

WELCOME TO THE GREATEST SHOW UNEARTHED!

The dark carnival is in town…”

The opening bit of the song was Johnny and various accompaniments, but when the chorus hit, Edgar and the others got to join in with the vocals. It was in these moments that Edgar thought he felt more people watching.

“Welcome to the lower birth
The Greatest Show Unearthed
We appear without a sound
The darkest show around

We will leave you in a daze
Madness, Murder, Dismay
We will disappear at night
With blood on the concrete

La,la la la, la …”

During rehearsal, Edgar had felt stupid doing the ‘la la’ bit, but now, now he felt empowered by it, if only because someone in the audience that didn’t know they were an audience yet jumped and looked at the band when the la-ing began. She stared at Johnny while he finished a verse, and when the chorus kicked in again, even more people began to watch, hitting people beside them who didn’t see yet. Edgar began hitting the keys harder, even if that didn’t make the sound louder, and with the last third of the song, the room was theirs.

”Come inside, for the ride,
Your deepest darkest fears
The best night of your life
You’re never leaving here

The Unknown, the Unseen
is what you’re going to find
Witness this, witness that,
until you lose your mind!

Welcome to the lower birth
The Greatest Show Unearthed
We appear without a sound
The darkest show around

We will leave you in a daze
Madness, Murder, Dismay
We will disappear at night
With blood on the concrete”

And people screamed. Most of them didn’t seem to know what was going on, but they wanted more of whatever magic made them suddenly see and hear a band where there had previously been nothing. They were applauding, they were cheering, and they were everywhere.

Johnny smiled at the mass and spoke into the microphone. “Hi. And how are you guys?”

The crowd cheered louder.

“That’s what I thought,” Johnny continued his very satisfied smile. “Congratulations, you’ve seen something that you can only see once – from now on, none of you will see us appear from nothing again. But if you bring a friend back here, say, on a Saturday, you can watch them realize that we exist.”

A roar erupted again. Edgar could only assume it was filled with cries of outrage or questions of why and how. Devi and Tenna started laughing behind him and Jimmy looked as though he’d finally gotten what he’d waited all his life for.

“That aside,” Johnny projected over the hollers, “would you teeming masses like a little more?”

Someone threw a canister of glitter out of the crowd.

“Alright then,” Johnny said, clearly pleased with himself. He motioned to Tenna to start the next strange backup track and from there, everything was a blur. Edgar remembered very little of what they played specifically, and who cheered when or why he only remembered the rush he felt when everything was over.

People would see him now.

He wasn’t sure if it terrified him or excited him for quite a while, before he finally determined that perhaps there is not as much of a difference between the two as people have previously thought.

*****

When the group realized that they were becoming popular, even on a small town scale, they began to demand things. Devi and Tenna had a song they wanted to do, but with ‘hello little boys, little toys’ as the opening line, those of the testosterone persuasion refused to play it. Jimmy wanted to do everything in German ever since his brief stint with a song in the language. Edgar was actually surprised at his dedication to it – beside Jimmy’s guitar these days was nearly always a German Dictionary.

“Here’s one you’ll like, Nny, really,” Jimmy started one day. “It’s ‘massakrieren’. Awesome, right?”

“Jimmy, are there any German words that don’t sound like abused English ones?” Johnny was sitting surprisingly still while Tenna applied various layers of stuff to his face. When quizzed about it, she only called it ‘product’.

“Du hast mich nicht gehört!”

“Or like you’ve got a hairball?”

“You’re just not appreciating the awesome of this.”

“I’ll be sure to let you know when I do.”

“Oh, fuck you. This is fucking awesome and you’ll think so too, just wait.”

“You’ll have to run it by everyone else too, Jimmy, I don’t see why you’re bitching at just me.”

“Because everyone listens to you! Oder es ist immer der Edgar…”

“Because he’s special. Mann, wer hätte das gedacht, hmm?”

Johnny stood up and walked out of the room with Tenna and Jimmy gaping after him.

*****

“I look like I haven’t slept in weeks,” Johnny said, looking at his face in the cracked mirror that hung in the office. Tenna had applied some serious darks around his eyes and managed to make it look like his cheeks had become less than they already were.

“That was the idea, wasn’t it?” Edgar asked. Edgar stood behind Johnny, trying not to pick at a green star sticker Tenna had put on his face.

“Yeah. Does it look like me?”

“Yes, it looks like both of you. It’s a little disturbing.”

“Excellent.” Johnny turned to look at Edgar. “What should we do with you?”

“Well, you seem to be going for some kind of theme, though fuck if I can figure out what that theme is… I mean, stars, color coding and dead man make-up?”

“Yeah, that’s about it.”

“Does this have anything to do with…,” Edgar started nervously.

“It has everything to do with that. ‘I’m not a homicidal maniac, but I play one on stage.’ ‘Dammit Jim, I’m a maniac, not a performer!’ Or maybe that would go the other way…”

Edgar had to laugh. “That’s how you’re going to deal with it then?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Johnny said, poking at the mirror with a gloved finger. “I’m going to perform the fuck out of it.”

“So, were you hoping the rest of us would do this too?”

“Well,” Johnny said, turning around to face Edgar, “if we put stitches across your neck…” His finger brushed Edgar’s neck and Edgar felt his skin tingle.

“Stitches?” He asked, rubbing his neck.

“You can’t play as a living guy, and we can’t have you up there in pieces, so…”

“In pieces…”

“That was how I killed you, wasn’t it?”

Edgar swallowed. “Yes.”

Johnny raised an eyebrow. “Oh, come on!” he said, crossing his arms, “I’m not going to hurt you just because Tenna piled product on my face.”

“It’s not that, Nny, jeez! It’s just a little uncomfortable thinking about being in pieces.”

“So don’t think about it and just think about product. This is not hard.”

“And what do you plan to do to the others?”

“Jimmy needs stitches too - they just need to go the whole way up his torso. He’ll need to wear no shirts or just vests all the time. Dammit, I really don’t want to be the one telling him that. Maybe we can pretend it was Tenna’s idea.”

“And Devi?” Edgar asked. “You didn’t kill her.”

“I’m thinking we’ll just white her out. Get some flour or something.”

“This doesn’t bother you at all does it?”

“No,” Johnny answered. “Should it?”

“I feel like it should, somehow. Like, ‘Hey guys, pretend to be my previous victims, will you? Okay great!’ It just seems – Well, I guess it’s you, I shouldn’t be surprised.” Edgar smiled. “Is she going to draw them onto my skin, or sew some string into wax?”

Johnny grinned.

*****

“He said you need to look dead, but just dead,” Tenna explained, covering Devi’s face and neck in white powder.

“Why are you the make-up lady, anyway?” Devi asked between puffs.

“Because I wanted to be.”

Devi really couldn’t argue with that logic, and let it pass. “Did you say ‘just dead’?” she asked after a moment.

“Yeah,” Tenna nodded. “Why?”

“Not like, ‘special dead’?”

“Oh, well, Edgar and Jimmy both need stitches since they were apparently sliced to death back in the day.” Tenna spoke as through she were merely explaining a co-worker’s absence. The car broke down, her kid has a dentist’s appointment, he was slashed to death.

“So I’m ‘just dead.’”

“Uh-huh.”

“God, Edgar gets to be special even when he’s dead.”

“Devi. The buttsex envy. It has to stop.”

“SWEET FUCK, Tenna, stop saying that!”

“Butt,” she poofed some powder on Devi’s nose, “sex.”

“Oh, hilarious. It doesn’t even bother you does it?”

“Buttsex? Not really.”

“Dammit, not that! I mean, preferential Edgar treatment.”

“I thought we got over this a while ago.”

“And maybe I still feel bitchy about it.”

“The way I see it,” Tenna said, smearing some ‘product’ under Devi’s eyes, “is that you, Edgar, and Jimmy all battle to the death for Johnny’s favor. Maybe you can use the giant Q-tips.”

“Sometimes, I really hate you.”

“I love you, too, Devi. Close your eyes, or I’m going to blind you.”

*****

“So, I think I’ve narrowed it down to “Massakriert”, “Das Tod” and “Blutige…” something. What do you guys like? I think we can get someone to make a logo now that some people can see us.”

“Jimmy, had you taken into account that we neither speak nor sing in German?”

“Well, we could.”

Devi sighed, and Edgar tried not to follow suit.

The group had assembled in Edgar’s living room, since night visits to the choir room were one of a few sacrifices they’d made to be visible. He’d never had Jimmy in his house before, and he was sure that Jimmy was mentally cataloguing everything that he found unfit for Johnny. Edgar wished dearly that he hadn’t started becoming suspicious of Jimmy, because now they had even more in common, but, damn, Jimmy made it easy.

“Jimmy, I’m not naming the band “Bloody People” in German. We’re not even fucking bloody!” Devi said.

“But we can be!”

“But we’re not. Just drop it, jeez.”

Johnny had been sitting on the coffee table, trying to come up with some clever play on the stars they wore on their cheeks. They’d bothered to color code them, he’d said, so why not factor them in. No one else seemed keen on being called ‘The Stars’ or “Die Sterne” so they’d mostly been ignoring Johnny’s mutterings.

“We’re some dead people,” Edgar said. “We need something that plays on that more than anything else, I think.”

“Death Written in the Stars?” Tenna offered. “Sort of awkward, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, just a little.”

“Star-Crossed … something,” Johnny tried. “Damn. I’m sure there’s something.”

“Guys, forget the stars. People are rarely known by their symbols, right? The convenience store isn’t ‘Happy Shopping Man’s Paradise’, it’s just Quik-Mart,” Edgar explained.

“Alright, alright,” Johnny said with a hint of a laugh. “I’ll let it go.”

“Well,” Jimmy said. “Nny is the guy in charge, and since he’s the only one not dead, maybe we should be ‘Nny and the Whatevers,’ you know?”

Edgar saw Johnny grin.

“I’m not opposed,” Edgar said. Devi shrugged and Tenna’s opinion, for the most part, didn’t count.

“So we’re ‘Nny and the Dead People’?” Devi asked. “Classy.”

“No, no,” Johnny said. “It’s got to a little more elegant than that.”

“Elegant? Nny, I wore neon pink in front of other humans. There is no elegance here.”

“You loved it,” Johnny replied through a wide grin.

“Fuck you.”

“Nny and the Fuck You’s,” Tenna said, amused.

“It’s really sad how accurate that is,” Edgar said, shaking his head.

“Zombies,” Jimmy said.

“Living Dead,” Johnny countered.

“Walking Dead?” Tenna tried.

“Uh-uh,” Johnny shook his head, “Playing Dead. Oh, hey, that’d be a good one on its own.”

“When did you become so fond of puns?” Edgar asked.

“I didn’t," Johnny answered, shrugging. "They’re just easy for other people to remember.”

“Nny and the Roadkill,” Devi said, expressing how futile this method was.

“You know, I think I’ve got it,” Edgar said.

*****

“You keep coming back.”

“You made some pretty drastic changes since I last spoke to you.”

“Pepito, you’re going to start showing up every time I decide to shave my head.”

“And so are some other people. They can see you now, can’t they?”

“Come inside, for the ride,
Your deepest darkest fears
The best night of your life
You’re never leaving here”

“Yeah. They like it, and we like it.”

“You know what you can do like this.”

“Absolutely. It doesn’t even matter if we’re terrible, though I’m going to make sure that we’re not, they’ll keep coming to look at us, and to hear music that they can’t find in their heads. We were invisible, and unheard, and they can’t keep hold on us. The music everyone in the world has access to includes everything but us.”

“And you enjoy it?”

“It’s no different from you – the love of having control over a teeming mass of morons in a place far too hot for anyone’s good. I just don’t keep my Hell in the basement, and my Hell loves me back.”

“What did you call it?”

“Oh, the band?” Johnny smiled and looked up from the pavement.

“Madness, Murder, Dismay
We will disappear at night
With blood on the concrete…”

“We’re The Homicides.”

“The Greatest Show Unearthed…"